Slaughterhouse Cases

Slaughterhouse Cases, in American history, legal dispute that resulted in a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1873 limiting the protection of the privileges and immunities clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

In 1869 the Louisiana state legislature granted a monopoly of the New Orleans slaughtering business to a single corporation. Other slaughterhouses brought suit, contending that the monopoly abridged their privileges and immunities as U.S. citizens and deprived them of property without due process of law. When the suit reached the Supreme Court in 1873, it presented the first test of the Fourteenth Amendment, a Reconstruction measure ratified in 1868.

By a five-to-four majority, the Court ruled against the other slaughterhouses. Associate Justice Samuel F. Miller, for the majority, declared that the Fourteenth Amendment had “one pervading purpose”: protection of the newly emancipated blacks. The amendment did not, however, shift control over all civil rights from the states to the federal government. States still retained legal jurisdiction over their citizens, and federal protection of civil rights did not extend to the property rights of businessmen.

Dissenting justices held that the Fourteenth Amendment protected all U.S. citizens from state violations of privileges and immunities and that state impairment of property rights was a violation of due process.

The Slaughterhouse Cases represented a temporary reversal in the trend toward centralization of power in the federal government. More importantly, in limiting the protection of the privileges and immunities clause, the court unwittingly weakened the power of the Fourteenth Amendment to protect the civil rights of blacks.